This blog is intended to provide the reader with important world news with an emphasis on Middle East and North Africa. It will publish news, analyses, comments, and opinions concerning those two regions. However, We welcome any comments, news or opinions which are related to their countries. You can visit too www.asswak-alarab.com for more information.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Annan's Mission Impossible

Why is everyone pretending that the U.N. plan in Syria has a
prayer of succeeding?

BY SALMAN SHAIKH

Kofi Annan

The
world is learning hard lessons in Syria. The United States has already admitted
that the mission of U.N. and Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan is likely to
fail, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that
Washington is preparing to take other measures against Bashar al-Assad's
regime. She pointed out what is clear to all: U.N. observers cannot operate
effectively while Assad refuses to abide by a ceasefire.

Let's
be clear about why Annan's mission has been unsuccessful. It is not failing
because the U.N. observers have been slow to deploy, or even because Assad has
yet to implement a single point from Annan's six-point plan. The fundamental
reason for Annan's failure is more basic than that: His plan is flawed because
it was formulated on the misguided belief that the Assad regime will ever stop
using violence against domestic protesters and negotiate with them in good
faith.

It
is high time to debunk once and for all the popular myths about the Syrian
regime. People have believed for too long -- whether out of naïveté or cynicism
-- that Assad has been willing to initiate political reforms and will do so in
due time. He has not and will not. Nor will the regime stop its violence. Doing
so would hasten its demise, as Syrians took to the streets by the hundreds of
thousands to protest freely and assume control of large parts of the country.

And
yet, the world still clings to the hope that the Annan plan will somehow bring
an end to the violence. It seems that we have lost our moral compass,
unrealistically hoping that Annan will succeed -- and largely doing so because
we are too timid to contemplate seriously other options to assist the Syrian
people.

Assad's
behavior during the 14-month long uprising shows that he has never seriously
considered a "fundamental change of course," as Annan has demanded.
Instead, Assad has sought to solve his problems through intimidation and brute
force. The estimated death toll of more than 11,000 Syrians since the beginning
of the uprising serves as a bloody testament to that fact.

Annan's
plan relies on the hope that Assad will negotiate in good faith, perhaps under
pressure from his Russian backers. He will not, and the regime will not accept
any credible opposition to its rule -- regardless of Moscow's preferences. The
regime's war crimes -- including the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas,
the forced displacement of civilians from cities, and the sanctioning of a mass
campaign of rape against women by security forces, including paramilitary
shabiha brigades -- speak for themselves. While the international community
continues to focus on Annan's efforts, it is unbelievable that Assad and his
regime are still not seen as international pariahs. The Syrian government has
lied to the international community at every turn. When will the world realize
that any attempt to negotiate with Assad is utterly futile?

The
Assad regime has so far successfully employed a strategy of buying time,
agreeing to the Annan plan while doing everything it can to undermine it.
Meanwhile, the international community has played into Assad's hands by buying
into the fanciful logic that the introduction of unarmed U.N. observers will
establish calm inside Syria and moderate the regime's behavior. Indeed, it was
only a few short weeks ago that French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé declared
that the Annan mission was "our last chance to avoid civil war." In a
rare moment of clarity, the head of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria
(UNSMIS), Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, admitted that not even 1,000 observers could
end the bloodshed.

The
only surprise here is that the U.N. Secretariat, which had grown increasingly
risk-averse following the al Qaeda bombing of its headquarters in Baghdad in
August 2003 that killed 22 of my former U.N. colleagues, has now embarked on
one of its most dangerous missions since then. Its brave blue berets have been
thrust into a situation where they are simultaneously in grave danger and do
not have the capability of fulfilling their mandate. This latest mission shows
that the United Nations has not learned the lessons of its failures in Bosnia
in the 1990s, when the initial peacekeeping mission did not have sufficient
capabilities to stop the slaughter in Srebrenica.

Not
even the Syrian regime's international protectors can convince it to abide by
the terms of the Annan plan. Russia, and to a lesser degree China, have indeed
leaned heavily on Assad in this regard, and there are signs from senior
diplomats and those close to the foreign policy communities in both countries
that Moscow and Beijing are getting fed up with Assad, and even consider his
eventual demise to be inevitable. But these frustrations have amounted to
naught. Neither country has convinced Assad to implement the Annan plan, and
they have not placed greater pressure on him to remove his heavy armor from
Syria's main cities. Instead, the Syrian army has resorted to placing sheets
over some of its tanks in a transparent ploy to trick the world that it is
abiding by the terms of the ceasefire.

Perhaps
Russia and China, like the Syrian regime itself, know that Assad would quickly
lose control of large parts of his country if he did so. Ironically, Moscow's
fears -- of losing its closest strategic ally in the region, of what comes
next, and of being frozen out of a new Syria, as was the case in Iraq and more
recently in Libya -- are taking it further from its strategic objectives. Assad's
game of buying time is losing Moscow valuable friends in the region. Working
toward a post-Assad Syria remains the only way to strengthen these fragile
ties.

Even
as Syria's death toll has mounted and the Annan plan increasingly looks like a
lost cause, decisive international action has been hard to come by. For all the
anti-Assad rhetoric coming from Ankara, Turkey has been reluctant to act
without U.S. and NATO backing to establish the much-hyped "safe
zones" inside Syria. Ankara has its own problems to deal with: As
Georgetown University professor Birol Baskan explains, Turkish reluctance is
due largely to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's fraught ties with his
nation's secularist military establishment, as well other domestic
vulnerabilities. And despite all the talk of arming the Free Syrian Army (FSA),
the Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular -- have hesitated, too.

The
United States also has little appetite for a more aggressive role in Syria. It
is clear that President Barack Obama is running for re-election on the
narrative that America's wars in the greater Middle East are coming to an end.
"As we emerge from a decade of conflict abroad and economic crisis at
home, it is time to renew America," he declared during a speech last week
in Afghanistan. Washington has accordingly been willfully slow to take
advantage of the strategic opportunity presented by regime change in Syria.
Instead of pressing its advantage and further isolating the regime's backers --
in particular, Iran -- the United States has taken the seemingly safer course
of increasing the economic pressure on Assad's regime.

In
the absence of clear and determined U.S. leadership, trying to make the doomed
Annan plan work will take the international community through the summer and
the U.S. presidential election, making any decisive international action
unlikely until the middle of next year at the earliest. This will be fatal for
the future of Syria, leading to more bloodshed, more radicalization on both
sides, and a heightened risk of ethnic and sectarian conflict.

The
consequences for international security will be dire. Syria's descent into
chaos is increasingly dividing the country and may even threaten its future as
a unified nation-state. Iraq's Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which is
increasingly flexing its political and economic muscles, has demonstrated that
borders cannot be taken for granted in this highly volatile region. Syria's
crisis may do for the Levant what the Iraq war did for Mesopotamia, unraveling
the post-World War I political fault lines of the Middle East. Worse, continued
conflict in Syria will likely spill beyond its borders and could re-ignite
smoldering sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon, threatening the stability
of the entire region.

With
the stakes so high, the international community cannot afford to pin its hopes
on the Annan plan. Instead, it should accept the hard lessons of the past 14
months and redirect its efforts toward changing the balance of power on the
ground.

Those
countries with a stake in Syria's future should do their utmost to help Syrians
organize a broad-based national movement that unites people on the basis of
opposition to the regime and commitment to a democratic Syria. This will
require undoing the Assads' 42-year old "divide and rule" strategy,
bringing together key groups of Syrian society such as minorities and tribes.
These groups now have a crucial role to play to hasten the regime's demise and
place Syria on a path to a democratic future.

There
are indications that such a strategy would meet with success. Over the past few
months, I have conducted extensive roundtable discussions with many Syrian
constituencies -- such as tribal figures, members of established families,
religious leaders, and representatives of the Kurdish community -- whose
interests are often poorly understood by the outside world. From these
conversations, I have found that there is a growing desire among tribal groups
from the strategically important eastern and northern areas of Syria to resist
Assad, including through military means, and to unite with other groups,
particularly the Kurds. In turn, some Kurdish leaders have indicated their
willingness, in ongoing private conversations with the tribes, to engage with
these groups. Although the Kurds are divided in their stance toward the
revolution, all want their culture and rights recognized in a post-Assad Syria.
Other communities, such as the Christians and Druze, have largely stayed on the
sidelines in the absence of a Syrian national project in which they have
confidence.

The
Syrian National Council (SNC), an anti-Assad opposition body that operates
largely outside the country, has assumed international importance as "a
legitimate representative of the Syrian people," in the words of the
"Friends of the Syrian People" group. However, my conversations with
tribal and minority figures clearly reveal that they have little confidence in
the SNC. Many point to the fact that it has no presence on the ground, and most
are suspicious of the influence that the Muslim Brotherhood and its perceived
patron, Turkey, wield within the organization.

These
groups express greater support for the fragmented FSA, even if it has struggled
to establish a clear command-and-control structure inside Syria from its
Turkish base. Tribal figures have stated that they want the international
community to support the FSA by providing expert assistance and help with
communications and specific armaments. They worry that the uncoordinated,
steady trickle of arms through private sources and the determined efforts of
jihadists to enter Syria through Iraq will lead only to further chaos. They
also point out that many FSA leaders and ordinary soldiers are "sons of
the tribes," and that more would join its ranks if the FSA had greater
external support. Notably, there is also increasing talk of a military alliance
between the FSA -- in collaboration with the SNC -- and the tribes and Kurds.

The
world should abandon the fiction that the Assad regime can be persuaded to
reach a political accommodation with its adversaries. Rather, it is time for a
renewed effort to forge a genuine united front, including all groups in Syria's
social fabric, dedicated to Assad's downfall and the establishment of a
pluralistic, democratic state in the aftermath. This effort needs stronger
international backing today -- opposition leaders inside and outside the
country do not have the resources to unite their ranks alone. If an endeavor to
create a genuine grand opposition coalition were to succeed, the Assad regime
would face a greater political and military challenge than ever before,
stretching its forces to a breaking point. With Annan's peace plan in tatters,
that's a goal the international community should embrace.

-This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 08/05/2012
-Salman Shaikh is director of the Brookings Doha Center. He previously served
as the special assistant to the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East
Peace Process and the U.N. under-secretary-general for political affairs

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...